Disclaimer: This review is of the Nintendo Switch version of the game and was played primarily in portable mode.
YIIK: A Postmodern RPG is a game I’ve been following and anticipating for quite a while now. This game was never on Kickstarter, being mostly a passion project built by a small studio over the duration of five years. The game showed promise and was picked up by a publisher relatively quickly, and many people have been eagerly anticipating the game. Through much hardship and even a death in the family, the two brothers at Ackk Studios have done a ton of work to make their dream game come to life. And it shows; this game has a lot of genuine and honest heart and it was clearly constructed with love.
That makes it all the more painful that the end result is a game that is so charming and captivating in presentation, but is also such an absolute trainwreck in writing that it came under a number of controversies within the first few days of release. It’s tonally inconsistent, frequently cringey, occasionally misguided, but absolutely captivating to watch in motion. A lot of games are described as trainwrecks, but only YIIK has been able to capture the “can’t look away” element of the equation. To sum it up in a way the game itself would: the two parallel universes where I love and hate this game exist in this universe at the same time.
The charming exterior
Image from GOG
If there’s anything YIIK does right, it’s nailing a fantastic and unique aesthetic. The game is an urban RPG with heavy inspiration from the Mother series (or Earthbound, for the Westerners), and that clearly shows with enemy designs, backgrounds and the general feel of the world. However, it’s still its own distinct piece of media, refusing to blend into the crowd of Mother-inspired games that have become strangely popular in the past decade. It’s 3D in a way that looks like a game from the N64 era, with sharp polygons and flat textures for models and environments. However, it also has some gorgeous artwork for the main cast of characters during cutscenes a la the Persona series, forgoing facial animations for detailed character sprites representing emotions during cutscenes. It’s colorful and pleasantly retro, making it a visually interesting game.
Musically, YIIK doesn’t disappoint either. Although there are a number of songs that are dissonant, repetitive and sometimes just uncomfortable to listen to, they fit together with the world and the rest of the soundtrack in a way that many games don’t accomplish. It reminds me a lot of Undertale in the way that YIIK’s composer Andrew Allanson incorporates a singular motif throughout much of the soundtrack that draws it all together. One of my personal favorite tracks, titled “Minor Conversation”, is delightful in how it portrays the nature of the world and its themes through a relatively simple song. The themes of tragedy and hopelessness that are core to the narrative find themselves played out in the soundtrack, while the themes of hope and overcoming the odds play out in many of the battle themes. Special recognition should be given to the track “Into the Mind,” which was composed by Undertale’s Toby Fox. It’s an amazing track on its own, and fits in with the rest of the game perfectly. Some props should also be given to the voice cast, who do an incredible job bringing life to a script that is less than amazing.
To top it all off, the combat itself, despite being a point of contention with many people, was one of my favorite parts of the game. It’s your typical turn-based RPG combat, although it plays more like Paper Mario or Legend of Dragoon than your typical turn-based game. Each attack the party does has a minigame attached to it. If you do the minigame well, you deal more damage. Additionally, all enemy attacks have a minigame attached to them. Compared to something like Paper Mario, these minigames can be surprisingly complex, like the top-down action game you play for Vella’s Banish ability or the Simon Says-esque game for Claudio’s Bushido ability. It keeps itself fresh to play through, despite some problems that do ruin the experience during the final stretches of the game.
The skeletons in the closet
All of those great aspects of YIIK –and I do genuinely believe they are great– aren’t left on their own though. Much like the game’s own narrative, there’s a darkness that hides behind the pleasant retro exterior. I’m talking about the true badness that has had the internet referring to this game as YIIKes.
Image from GOG
To start, let’s touch on the combat again. It’s fun at first, and remains pretty entertaining throughout, but it’s not without its problems. The game is slow– as in reeeeeally slow. That’s not just talking about the loading times on the Nintendo Switch version (which are almost Sonic 06-bad), that’s talking about combat itself. The game includes both a speed-up and slow-down feature for combat. The slow-down is tied to the “Time Energy” meter, and is used to succeed in the tougher minigames or guarantee dodging enemy attacks. The speed-up is an optional, but necessary feature to use since all combat animations are twice the length they should be. An attack has four components: the transition to the minigame, the minigame itself (which can last upwards of 30 seconds), the attack animation itself, and then the animation of it hitting the enemy or the enemy dodging. This applies to every single attack, enemies included. It’s cinematic and fun to watch at first, but it gets tiresome and slow during later fights in the game. Even with speeding up, some fights last way longer than they reasonably should.
But that’s not even the bad part of the game. It’s annoying, but it’s not necessarily that bad. The really bad part of the game is in the writing. Remember the mid-2000s webcomic craze? Back when Penny Arcade (the comic) and Ctrl-Alt-Del were at their peaks in popularity? The writing in those comics is, in hindsight, typically pretty embarrassing, being a splurge of references to games while being fairly devoid of actual joke and punchlines. YIIK has writing on that level, and the biggest criminal is Alex Eggleston himself. He takes the cake for most unlikeable RPG protagonist, dethroning the former king, Tales of the Abyss’s Luke. He’s pretentious, self-absorbed, abusive and overall very embarrassingly cringey for most of the game. Even after he supposedly learns his lesson in Chapter 3, he still has some pretty bad lines, just not “I don’t care about your dead sister” bad. There are also some controversial themes and moments within the game, and after doing research on them it definitely hurts the overall experience when you think about it. At the very least, maybe having a grave dedicated to Iwata in some dude’s backyard next to graves with jokes on them is a little misguided.
Image from GOG
The line-by-line quips themselves are bad, but even worse is the overall narrative. It can never seem to find its footing between “quirky and wacky” and “thought-provoking and moving,” and ends up failing to balance the two in a good way. Most notable is an out-of-place joke during Chapter 3 where Rory’s Mom is “all leg” (aka a giant leg), which directly follows cutscenes involving Alex being a massive tool about Rory’s dead sister. There are a number of interesting ideas in the story, particularly how it plays with the concept of parallel universes, but it ends up just fumbling and failing to make the most of some genuinely interesting aspects. It’s so close to being good, but it just falls short.
The compelling disaster of it all
These problems would generally mean that the game wouldn’t be recommended. These problems should keep the game shelved and sent to the abyss of obscurity. And perhaps it’ll find itself there. Yet, despite all of its problems, there’s something so incredibly compelling within YIIK that I couldn’t stop playing. The genuine heart this game has is infectious, and there are still plenty of interesting ideas and locations that a player will want to keep exploring and diving deeper into, even if these ideas don’t live up to their potential. The story itself, despite numerous idiosyncrasies and general tone-deafness, is fascinating to watch play out. And yes, even through getting stuck in walls, opening shop menus during combat, having the Switch version ask me if I’m using an Xbox One controller, bugging out puzzles so they don’t work, and even discovering that the main character is in love with a girl who is a reference to a real life tragedy in a somewhat insensitive way didn’t stop me. This game is amazing to experience, even though it hurts. For those who love watching terrible stories unfold, this game is the perfect trainwreck.
Featured Image: GOG
Images: GOG
For more entertainment related content, visit us at Byte BSU!
